Where Mazes Came From

Mazes. For some adventurers, a maze is an enjoyable challenge,
offering them the chance to explore and map. For others, a maze is a
waste of time, a relic of games past that should be left out.

For a long time, mazes were all but required in adventure
games. But with the advent of graphic adventure games and the
increasing sophistication of text adventure players, mazes fell out of
fashion.

The Origin of Mazes

Be it clearly said: it is designers who like mazes ("Concocting such
mazes is one of my delights" -- Peter Killworth); players do
not like mazes.
-- Graham
Nelson, The Inform Designer's Manual, 4th Ed.

The history of adventure game mazes is concurrent with that of
adventure games themselves: the first one appeared in Advent
(sometimes called Colossal Cave). In that game, players who
manage to cross a fissure soon find themselves faced with one of the
most famous adventure game room descriptions:

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Advent began life as a cave simulation written by Will
Crowther. One feature many caves have is a section of rock honeycombed
with passages hollowed out by meandering streams of water. Climbing
through such passages can challenge the direction sense of the best
cavers. You might start out moving north, but then find yourself
travelling east before you know it. Some passages loop back on
themselves, motion without progress.

So it is with the Maze of Twisty Passages in Advent. The
room descriptions are all the same, leaving players without any clear
sense of where they are. Rooms are not connected through matching
directions. After moving north, you might have to travel west to
return to your original room. And some directions loop back to the
same room.

The trick to mapping the maze lay in distinguishing one room from
another. The traditional method of doing so was to drop an item in
each room, then move in a given direction. If the "new" room had the
same item in it, you knew you'd looped back. Otherwise, you could drop
a different item in the new room and keep moving. Eventually every
room would have an item, making the task of distinguishing one room
from another much easier.

There was a second maze in Advent, in which each of the room
descriptions varied slightly. "You are in a maze of twisty little
passages, all different." "You are in a little maze of twisty
passages, all different." "You are in a twisty little maze of
passages, all different." This maze didn't require the player to drop
any items in order to map it, since the rooms were already
distinguished by their descriptions.

Mutating Mazes

I've done my time with mazes, and I'm not interested in
them any more. I don't want to have to drop things. I don't want to
have to do a lot of laborious note-taking. "Hunter, in Darkness" can
get away with having a maze, but only because mapping is not the
solution. Any maze that does not have a clever, non-mapping solution,
I don't care about.
-- Emily
Short

As the first text adventure, Advent defined a number of
tropes which carried forward into countless games. Initially, a number
of people modified Advent. One common modification was the
addition of new mazes. The 550-point variant of Advent, written
by David Platt in 1979, had an ice maze which differed from the Twisty
Maze. Room connections were logical, in that travelling north then
south would take you back to where you started. Instead, the maze had
no obvious exit once entered. The key to escaping it was encoded in
how the rooms were laid out.

For a short while, every adventure game that wasn't a direct
modification of Advent was instead a near-recreation of that
game. As such, they included mazes. Dungeon, which was later
broken into Zork I, II, and III, had not only a
traditional Advent-like maze but the infamous "baseball
diamond" maze. The traditional maze in Dungeon had a gentleman
thief, similar in function to Advent's pirate, who would wander
the maze, picking up items you dropped in an effort to map it.

Acheton, one of the Phoenix games written at Cambridge, was
Advent writ large. It weighed in at 162 objects and 403
locations, and had a number of mazes. Adam Atkinson, in responding
to the question, "What's the longest maze you've ever found?"
said, "The pillar maze in Acheton? The snake maze in Acheton? The
lower levels of the mine in, er, Acheton? Not sure which maze is the
longest I've seen, but I think I know which game probably contained
it."

Most of the Phoenix games, in fact, contained mazes. Very quickly a
Cold War of maze design was on, with authors inventing new and
terrible ways to confuse players. Mazes which could be solved merely
by mapping and dropping objects quickly were passé. In their
place grew indicator mazes, ones which could be solved by use of an
appropriate object which would show you what direction to take. Other
twists were added. Monsters of Murdac had a "black hole maze,"
in which there was no light and dropped objects vanished, never to be
found again. The only way to map the maze was to work out what
possible exits each room had, and a number of rooms had identical
exits.

Other game designers were not immune to maze
madness. Snowball, by Level 9, boasted of being the largest
game in existence at the time by virtue of its 7,000 rooms. However,
some 6,800 of those formed a maze.

Mazes were so common in games that in his 1982 book "Writing BASIC
Adventure Programs for the TRS-80," Frank DaCosta wrote, "An adventure
program is hardly complete without a maze." Kim Schuette, in
describing what makes a good adventure for her book "The Book of
Adventure Games," said, "Take a look at your map. Is it logically laid
out? Do the mazes have a reason for existence, or are they pointless?
Are there too many mazes for the size and complexity of the game?" The
existence of mazes in adventures was a given.

Waning Popularity

Between 1992 and 1994, several authors released full-length works.
The quality of this new wave of amateur IF often matched Infocom's
early games, and was sufficient to interest more people in IF and in
the newsgroup. During this period people argued a lot about what made
a good puzzle, and what made a good game.... To give you an idea of
what it was like: during this time, arguments about whether or not
mazes were good things to have were still fairly common.
-- Dave
Baggett

Designers' penchant for mazes could only last so long. The 1985
Magnetic Scrolls adventure The Pawn had a sign in front of its
maze stating, "Warning: This maze is totally irrelevant to the
adventure." This was completely true; in fact, the maze could be
"solved" via the command >EXIT MAZE.

Concurrent with this increased sophistication of adventure game
players was the rise of graphic adventures, which only hastened the
maze's demise. Traversing terrain in graphic adventures in which you
controlled an avatar, such as the Sierra and LucasArts games, took
more time than it did in text adventures. This made graphic mazes much
more tedious than their text counterparts.

Some graphic adventures have included mazes which hearken back to
the ones in Advent and other early adventures. Myst had
a maze which had a trick to it: you could solve it by mapping all of
the locations, or you could pass through it without mapping if you
realized the trick to the maze. More recently, Escape from Monkey
Island used an indicator maze which was impassable if you did not
have the correct object to show you what direction to go. And
Stupid Invaders contained several mazes, including a full-blown
hedge maze which had no shortcut (and, indeed, had a delaying tactic
in the form of a snail which you had to ride); players and reviews
were not kind to the game on this point.

Some recent text adventures have used mazes to good effect as
well. But even Andrew Plotkin's Hunter, in Darkness, which won
the 1999 XYZZY Award for "Best Individual Puzzle" on the strength of
its maze, was heavily criticized for that same maze by many
reviewers.

The chance of mazes completely vanishing from contemporary
adventure games is small. However, it's doubtful that mazes will stage
a comeback to reclaim their former status as required puzzle.